Rise in child sex abuse being committed by children
In the East over 10,000 chid sexual abuse cases were reported last year
Last updated 10th Jan 2024
Half of child sexual abuse offences reported to police in 2022 were crimes committed by children, a landmark report has found.
Previously around a third of recorded crimes were classed as child-on-child - those aged 10 to 17 committing offences against other children - but in 2022 this rose to 52% in what police called "a growing and concerning trend".
The National Police Chiefs Council have collated data from 43 police forced in England and Wales, and who showed a total of 106,984 child sexual abuse offences were reported to police in 2022.
That's up 7.6% on the previous year and up from just over 20,000 recorded in 2013.
Around a third of all crimes committed directly against children involved abuse within families, and experts believe it will take years for the full scale of abuse committed during the pandemic to become known.
On average, victims of this kind of abuse take 17 years to report it to police, and it it feared that many crimes are going unreported.
In the East:
Regionally, most of the cases were reported in the north west of England, where 19.3% of offences were recorded.
The force with the greatest number was Britain's largest, the Metropolitan Police, followed by West Yorkshire and Greater Manchester.
While there are currently not figures for child on child abuse in the East, the NSPCC says cases of sexual abuse are high.
The charity says more than 10,000 child sex offences were reported to police in our region between 2022 and last year.
This includes:
• Bedfordshire Police - 840
• Cambridgeshire Police – 1,364
• Essex Police - 2,638
• Hertfordshire Police – 1,152
• Norfolk Police – 1,667
• Northamptonshire Police – 1,346
• Suffolk Police – 1,417
The NSPCC found Essex Police received the most reports of child sex offences in the East in 2022, with 2,638, followed by Norfolk Police (1,667) and Suffolk Police (1,417).
Bedfordshire Police received the lowest number of reports with 840.
"Desperately concerning"
Donald Findlater's, director of child sexual abuse prevention charity's Lucy Faithfull Foundation's Stop It Now helpline, says these stats are a major concern.
"Whether it's media, social media. pornography use by children and young people, all sorts of reasons but what we know is more children are getting involved in being sexually aggressive towards other children," he said.
"Parents need to know that.
"We know children's access to pornography and other unhelpful content on websites is fuelling an amount of sexual aggression online and offline; that's part of the story."
Donald says parents can do more to help make children feel safer.
"We have to improve the standards of content children are accessing online and have to arm parents with that information so they're doing their best to keep their children safe from being sexually abused but also behaving sensibly and responsibly," he added.
"I speak as a parent and a grandparent; if I'm concerned about something that worries me about the information they've got about sexuality which I think seems inappropriate, I need to do something about it, not just sit on my hands and do nothing."
Ian Critchley, National Police Chiefs Council lead for Child Abuse Protection and Investigation, said the new figures "helps us understand more widely the growing challenges we are all facing nationally not least young people growing up today.
"We also know that sadly reported crime remains significantly lower than the actual crimes of child abuse that take place with the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse reporting one in six girls and one in 20 boys will be abused in childhood, an appalling statistic and one we must all seek to change.
"This analysis will help police and our partners develop and improve our prevention, disruption, and investigation of these appalling crimes against children."